The Canyons, a howlingly bad soap-opera-meets-soft-core-porn mash-up, sticks a cinematic fork into Lindsay Lohan, signalling her screen career is well and truly done.

There’s no reason to watch this sloppily executed low-budget attempt at a noir thriller pairing Lohan with James Deen, Adult Video News’ Male Performer of the Year — except perhaps curiosity.

Yes, Lohan takes her top off a few times and participates in a few mimicked sex scenes, including some half-hearted kisses with a naked woman as part of a tepid foursome. But they are so lacking in heat, they wouldn’t warm a shivering hamster.

With its clunker of a script, this sad exploitation has generated far more chatter about the crowdsourced low-budget flick than it warrants, all of it down to the ongoing decomposition of the spectacularly troubled former child star.

Clumsily written by American Psycho’s Bret Easton Ellis and directed by Paul Schrader (hard to believe he is the same person who directed American Gigolo and wrote Taxi Driver), The Canyons is a confusing and uninspired tale of lies, power-brokering and a bit about the low-budget end of the movie business.

There’s also sex, thanks to Deen’s trust-fund brat Christian, who likes to invite men, women and couples he meets online over to his spectacular cliffside Malibu mansion for after-dinner romps with his girlfriend, Tara (Lohan). He’s not shy about showing his tackle in one scene, making a slow climb up the stairs to his bedroom where Lohan awaits.

The Canyons actually starts out with promise, with a montage of shuttered and decayed movie theatres rotting in the sun.

Early trailers suggested this film would be seen in black and white, and many of these initial images are so washed out as to appear colourless, but there was clearly a change of heart on a few fronts. And hopes this could be an art-house comment on L.A. life evaporates from the head-scratching first scene.

The Canyons presents a confusing story, the upshot of which is that Tara is keeping secret that she once had a thing with wannabe actor Ryan (Canadian Nolan Gerard Funk), now that she’s with control-freak sexual voyeur Christian, who is bankrolling a low-budget horror film because he’s bored. Tara came on board as a producer and helped out with casting, suggesting Ryan for the lead.

Gina (Amanda Brooks, the only person onscreen who appears to have genuine acting skills) is the horror movie’s director and also Ryan’s girlfriend. But what’s this? Ryan and Tara are having an affair, and if Christian finds out, that would be very bad.

Tara spends a great deal of time texting people, which may explain why she talks in exclamation-point sentences. “I’m not going back to that bar!” “This can’t be my phone!”

Even the extras are terrible actors, looking into the camera, then looking guiltily away as they walk past. Director Gus Van Sant (Milk, Elephant) plays Christian’s psychotherapist, showing that as an actor, he’s one heck of a director.

The other players are as wooden as Pinocchio and if it weren’t for smartphones keeping the plot moving, I’d still be sitting in the theatre.

“Do you really like movies?” Tara asks Gina over a lunch arranged by Christian as a fishing expedition to find out what his girlfriend is up to.

“Maybe it’s not my thing anymore,” Tara says. We can only hope.

It’s a little sad and a lot creepy to watch Lohan onscreen. She looks attractive and seems focused in some scenes, but in others, she’s bloated, distracted and looks far older than 27.

Not long after shooting the movie, she was back to court-ordered rehab, where she remained until recently. And, according to Schrader, all did not go smoothly on the set.

In a recent column in movie industry magazine Film Comment, he likened working with Lohan to what director John Huston faced with Marilyn Monroe’s bedevilled work on the 1961 drama The Misfits.

“Tardiness, unpredictability, tantrums, absences, neediness, psychodrama — yes, all that,” Schrader wrote of Lohan, “but something more, that thing that keeps you watching someone onscreen, that thing you can’t take your eyes off of, that magic, that mystery. That thing that made John Huston say, ‘I wonder why I put myself through all this, then I go to dailies.’”

He flatters himself, and Lohan, who is a long shot from being Monroe.

The Canyons opens the same day it goes to video-on-demand, and curiously, then heads to the Venice Film Festival to screen out of competition in the company of films such as Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity.

You have to wonder if the Venetian programmers have been drinking canal water to think this silly effort is a worthy addition to mark a film festival’s 70th year. But then, any publicity is good publicity, especially when it’s free.

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